How To Navigate Sadness

Sometimes, when we look in the mirror, we see something else. Maybe something we don't like. But we should not get too discouraged because some of these changes will pass with time. Sometimes, it is reflection of who we might become if we do not change. Sometimes, even with the sad days that have passed by, we can say that this passing was not too difficult for us, but rather uncomfortable. Perhaps many things inside us have been transformed; perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside our being, we have undergone important changes while we were sad.

The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise. Like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw, and after a short interval or break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside. The life that is unlived, rejected, lost. If only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment. Perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing.

It seems to me that almost all our sadness are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes. The new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was.

We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and vigilant when one is sad, because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than other loud or accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open in our sorrow, the more deeply and serenely this new presence can enter us.

Therefore it becomes our fate to grow and let go of our past mistakes by asking for forgiveness. This is when the sadness passes and the pain will go away. People have already had to rethink so many concepts of motion; and they will also gradually come to realize that what we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us. The people you meet in your life are at times a reflection of you in the past or present time. Even possibly the future if our behavior does not change. So many of us have not absorbed and transformed our fates while living that we sometimes do not realized what was emerging from us.